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Snopes.com Editor on Fake News: Social Media Is Not the Problem (backchannel.com)
"Honestly, most of the fake news is incredibly easy to debunk because it's such obvious bullshit..." says Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of the fact-checking at Snopes.com. "It's not social media that's the problem. People are looking for somebody to pick on." mirandakatz shared this article from Backchannel:
The problem, Binkowski believes, is that the public has lost faith in the media broadly -- therefore no media outlet is considered credible any longer. The reasons are familiar: as the business of news has grown tougher, many outlets have been stripped of the resources they need for journalists to do their jobs correctly. "When you're on your fifth story of the day and there's no editor because the editor's been fired and there's no fact checker so you have to Google it yourself and you don't have access to any academic journals or anything like that, you will screw stories up," she says.
I found this article confusing. Snopes seemed to be trying to steer the conversation back to erroneous stories from "legitimate publications," which erode the public trust in all mainstream outlets. (Which I guess then over time hypothetically makes people more susceptible to fake news stories on Facebook.) But her earlier remarks suggest it's not really credibility that's lacking there -- it's the absence of someone convenient to pick on. So what is the problem? Is it the news media's lack of credibility? Algorithms that disproportionately reward alarming stories? A human tendency to seek information that confirms our pre-existing biases? What do Slashdot readers think is causing what this article describes as "our epidemic of misinformation"?
I found this article confusing. Snopes seemed to be trying to steer the conversation back to erroneous stories from "legitimate publications," which erode the public trust in all mainstream outlets. (Which I guess then over time hypothetically makes people more susceptible to fake news stories on Facebook.) But her earlier remarks suggest it's not really credibility that's lacking there -- it's the absence of someone convenient to pick on. So what is the problem? Is it the news media's lack of credibility? Algorithms that disproportionately reward alarming stories? A human tendency to seek information that confirms our pre-existing biases? What do Slashdot readers think is causing what this article describes as "our epidemic of misinformation"?
Sorry, is this a real news story about snopes, or a fake news story?
Notice how many news sites (like CNN) now interleave fake story links with their real stories? And we wonder why the general populous is confused. If the news organizations want to regain lost trust they need to do away with such tactics. As it stands, the news sites are basically endorsing these sites.
What do Slashdot readers think is causing what this article describes as "our epidemic of misinformation"?
Gullible Idiots and confirmation bias.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Nothing is causing it. Fake news has been around forever, just look around your supermarket checkout line.
We're having a "national dialog" about this "issue" because the political establishment is pissed that their candidates didn't get elected and they are trying to figure out how to regain control of the electorate.
What people seem to slowly realize is that just because news outlets can tell you the truth due to freedom of speech disallowing government from keeping them doesn't mean that they are by any means required to do so.
We used to equate the freedom of the press with the press telling how it really is because, hey, nobody keeps them from doing just that. In fact, though, the difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that the lies the press tell you differ from the lies the politicians tell you, not that they tell you no lies.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Ahh, yes, get all upset when someone else uses the USA's playbook against it.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
So, this is it. Journalism is too tough because the business of news is too tough. Seriously? Soul-searching and THIS is the best they could come up with? I thought after the shock election result, the Left was supposed to wander in the desert and seek answers? They STILL don't get it?
An explanation that does not include the fact that the media dropped its last pretense at truth-telling and wholeheartedly backed the worst political candidate since Edwin Edwards is NOT truth-telling! Jesus Christ! The first step in fixing a problem is admitting that there is a problem! Even the New York Times came out and said that after the election they had to rededicate themselves to journalism. Why would they need to do that unless they lost their dedication in the first place?
The Emperor has no clothes. The whole world saw it. Yeah, if you don't read international news from non-European sources, it was obvious to everyone worldwide that the US media were totally supporting Hillary. They're used to detecting this kind of bullshit after all, but they're just not allowed to report it when it concerns their own corrupt elites. The US media are bankrupt, deplorable, and irredeemably biased. Cancel your paying subscription today and help them into the grave. Cancel your ad buys. Tell the reporters you don't trust them when they want to cover your daughter's softball championship win. It's the only way we can progress as a society.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It is similar to the way fundamentalist sects work.
1. (Confirmation bias) people prefer to be told what they like to hear, to have their beliefs and wishes confirmed.
2. (Intellectual laziness) people don't tend to waste effort scrutinising what they already agree with.
3. (Complexity of debunking) to give a convincing reason why fake news is wrong, you have to go into details, and this turns off many readers, especially the intelligent readers with cerebral jobs whose brains are tired from their day jobs.
4. (Effort of debunking) it is often easier to knock out a fake story sufficiently plausible to those who already agree with it, than to put out a carefully thought through article debunking fake news.
The problem is one of quality vs quantity: once you have the right psychological conditions (charismatic leader or group saying what some want to hear, frustrated audience that want change), fake news in support of something can be churned out, and circulated via media, social or traditional, on an industrial scale, cheaply and largely decentralised. Proper journalism and proper rebuttals simply can't be produced on a comparable scale. So to the naive, it can can appear clear that the balance favours the fake news.
(The comparison with fundamentalism can be seen if you peruse some of the religious apologetics literature, or books pushing creationism or similar.)
Reason and scrutiny are intellectually expensive, and cheap and cheerful bullshit is not.
John_Chalisque
The problems is free news. Or more correctly, people not wanting to pay for news.
For some strange reason, people expect to get their news for free on the internet. Which is kind of strange, when most people would gladly pay for a video or music subscription, or even buy digital content like games, they throw a hissy fit when they hear of a news paywall.
The problem is that news, reliable news, is not free. Research, fact checking and editing is a time and money consuming task. So when people demand their news for free, either two things can happen. 1) shut down operations (which has been the case for a few newspapers so far) or 2) pursue an ad-revenue model.
Now I don't have to tell you what the problem with 2) is. Boring stories, however important they may be, generate no traffic. Misleading headlines, half-truths and sensationalism on the other hand generates a lot of clicks and therefore is more profitable to post fake news, hearsay and rumors than do some actual journalistic work.
Social platforms exacerbate the problem. Media outlets, in an effort to reach as many people as possible (more revenue) use social networks to push their unchecked, half-baked articles. Echo chambers quickly form, and like in a very twisted version of the Telephone Game, the story mutates, getting worse as it goes along.
Want the problem to stop? It's easy: Stop getting your news from facebook (I'd personally recommend stop using facebook altogether) Stop complaining about the damn paywall and pay a subscription to a couple of trusted news outlets.
The real problem is us.
I found this article confusing.
That much is clear.
Snopes seemed to be trying to steer the conversation back to erroneous stories from "legitimate publications," which erode the public trust in all mainstream outlets. [...] But her earlier remarks suggest it's not really credibility that's lacking there -- it's the absence of someone convenient to pick on.
Sigh, no. Reading comprehension? You fail it! "It's not social media that's the problem. People are looking for somebody to pick on." That does not mean that the problem is that people are looking for somebody to pick on. It means that the problem is not social media, nothing more. And the problem, as TFS says (you got it right there in the quote!) is that "the public has lost faith in the media broadly". See how that works? The problem is not blame-placing. The problem is media in which it is not reasonable to have faith, which is a problem which has always been with us but which reached a head when Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996.
Seriously, you can't even read, and you have an editor job? This is why we can't have nice things. Millions of unemployed in this country, and people are hiring people who can't even fucking read to be editors.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's an accident of history.
Newspapers have always had a tabloid tendency and were in many ways worse in the 1920s and 1930s, the era of the Hearst newspaper empire and Hearst's many political agendas which he used his newspaper empire to push. The mass media had characters like Father Coughlin and his Breitbart levels of populism and antisemitism.
It's only after WW II that the newspapers become something of a serious and more neutral force, but even then they were glossing over some facts, such as ignoring Presidential affairs. By the early 1970s, we have the dawn of the crusading liberal in the form of Woodward and Bernstein, taking Nixon down with their Watergate reporting and the NY Times with the Pentagon Papers.
In spite of this, I think in this era the media was taking its role as the Fourth Estate seriously and with an academic level of introspection and attempted neutrality.
I think it began taking a further turn for the worse when CNN and the 24 hour cable news network came around. Not only did it help hollow out newspaper publishing as a business, but it inaugurated the relentless news cycle where fresh content had to be sourced every few hours, leading the press to spend its time not developing good stories, but searching for the next quote, the next nugget or the next angle.
The Internet made the 24 hour news cycle worse. Where CNN made new TV news every few hours, now newspapers were expected to have something new every time the page was reloaded. Social media and clickbait made it worse, making it harder for the consumer to sift news from hype.
With all of this, I don't think the major news outlets have made it better. I've subscribed to the NY Times for 20-odd years and I think it's journalistic neutrality has been seriously in question for years now. In this election cycle, the bias for Hillary has been palpable. Their article choices and language always made it harder for Sanders to appear serious, and Hillary was given every pass and very positive coverage. Once Trump became the leading Republican candidate, they were writing "analysis" headlines questioning their obligation to neutrality. To me it seemed fairly clear that journalism itself was operating in a demographic bubble of like-thinking liberals bought into the Hillary agenda.
She might have won the majority of votes, but that's not the game they were playing. Just like a given team might have scored more runs overall than another in the world series, what counts is the number of games they actually won. If the rules had been different, the behavior would have been different. Trump would have spent more time in California and New York, and Hillary would have spent more time in Texas. You don't know how it would have turned out.
Also, stop blaming all your problems on Russia. You sound like a crazy person.
I think fragmentation is the biggest cause of fake news. When there were only a few viable news sources, they had to cater to everyone so stores were less biases and fact checking more rigorous.
Unfortunately, you have that completely ass-backwards. Conglomeration is the biggest cause of fake news. When Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act of 1996 he opened the door for media consolidation which removes the alternative outlets which once kept the major media corporations in check. They simply buy out the competition that would point out the flaws in their reporting. With nothing to keep them honest, the major media conglomerates can report essentially anything they like. As their credibility falls, the fake news seems more credible by comparison.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem isn't fake news on social media. The problem is that major news sites gave up being subtle with their bias and went on an all out attack against Trump.
Everyone expects that kind of reporting from places like Huff Post, USAToday, MSNBC, and Drudge Report. But this time sites like the Washington Post, NYT, and CNN stopped pretending to report facts and published nothing but attacks; the worse their "reporting" got the more frustrated they became as readers increasingly ignored what was obvious BS. They're trying to blame the BS that was circulating on Facebook for influencing people, but their real problem is that their own voices faded away.
It's a little bit of all theories, it's not new, and it has been amplified by current events.
First of all, there's no epidemic of misinformation. What happens is that there has always been an epidemic of lack of critical reasoning.
Tabloid journalism is as old as journalism itself, and too many people have favored it since ancient times.
In fact, none of the stuff mentioned is new. Confirmation bias? Sensationalism? Lack of credibility coming from tabloid journalism? These are all stuff that have always been out there.
It could be argued that this blaming of specific social networks (such as Facebook and Twitter) is also part of tabloid journalism.
There are definitely some people trying to blame them for stuff that they don't particularly like themselves, like the results of a democratic election of an US president. Because it's easy to take a company as scapegoat while ignoring that none of the fake news and none of the people who believe it are part of the company itself.
The fact is that US citizens elected Trump whether you like it or not. And Facebook or Twitter didn't vote for him. In fact, if anything these companies' CEOs and employees were probably against him becoming president.
Blogs like Gizmodo who keeps posting these idiotic whinning posts trying to blame Facebook for Trump being elected are just like kids in denial... they simply don't want to admit living in a country that is not aligned with their own personal political views.
We're currently at a transitional period from traditional journalism to Internet portals and blogs, so there will be some confusion regarding the new media. It certainly allows fake news to spread in an easier way, but it also allows a broader range of news in general, different perspectives, and coverage overall.
Personally, I don't see it as a bad thing. Journalism just has a new dimension... it became a tool for information that has more potential and that is more powerful, for the good and bad. It is not controlled or limited by a handful of huge news corporations anymore. If we as a society is letting it take a turn for the bad, we only have ourselves to blame. The way journalism and information spreads in society is just a reflection of it.
It's up to us to learn how to use it. We can't expect to be babysitted everytime something defies our ability to use critical reasoning. If people are being fooled by something as trivial as fake news, and cannot be bothered with something as basic as fact checking, we get the results we deserve. That's not a problem with how news work, that's a problem with education and culture.
Traditional journalism has always been swayed by popularity. You really don't have to go too far into history to see it. It's a huge mistake to think we always had impartial coverage in the past, or that the results of elections would be different if it wasn't for social networks and whatnot.